the life and times of endenizen » Pictures

Halley and I went to the beautiful island of Oahu for a romantic getaway over 4th of July weekend. Also, we got engaged! Check out some more pictures here: Hawaii Trip July 2010.

First, an announcement from today: the next version of Android. Better performance, wifi tethering (!), ‘update all’, and more! I can’t wait to get this. These are much-needed updates that make the platform much more powerful. Check out the embedded video below for details.

[Via: Google Announces the Next Version of Android.]

Next, an announcement from yesterday: easy web fonts! The previous solutions to non-web-fonts-on-the-web involved rendering images, embedding flash objects, or using canvas (when it was available). These methods might have gotten the job done, but they were difficult to implement and each had its share of drawbacks.

Along comes Google Font API and all those problems disappear. Now you can easily use real fonts without adding complexity. Best of all, it’s cross-browser (even IE6!) and works just the way it should: just set the font-family in css. I’ve already added a new font to my blog which you can see in the screenshot. It really was as easy as they say:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Tangerine">
<style>
  body {
    font-family: 'Tangerine', serif;
    font-size: 48px;
  }
</style>

(Note: I’m not actually using Tangerine. I tried it, and it’s gross.)

[Via: Making Good Typography on the Web Easier: Google Introduces Font API and Directory.]

But oh so nice…

I have a pet peeve and it’s that some bloggers wait ages between posts and then update with a “long time no post, soon i’ll have more”. But they don’t have more. They just wait a while and then don’t post anything else! It’s like that time I bought my first domain name in 2001 and to this day it has a “coming soon” graphic. Granted, there were many legitimate uses for that domain, like testing my early designs in secret sections of the site, but to everyone else, it looked pretty much the same all those years (hmm, 5 years as of a few weeks ago).

I guess what I’m trying to say is, “it’s been a while”. I’ll try and leave you with more than “soon I’ll have more” because I know how much that sucks. Eh, while I’m stooping this low for an excuse for a blog entry, I might as well make it the dreaded… LIFE UPDATE BLOG!

I’ll guide this “life update blog” with a picture tour of recent happenings. Some more recent than others, as circumventing that is still physically (and thankfully) impossible.

Here’s our circuit board toaster. I know, I know, it looks a lot like a regular toaster, but there’s a big difference. You really don’t want to eat anything toasted in here, or really be in the same room when this thing is doing its toasting. In fact, you should probably take anything I say with a grain of salt (along with some heavy duty oven mitts and a well-ventilated area) because I’m not so sure it’s a good idea at all. Ah yes, the point of this thing… We (being members of the Computer Club who risk life and limb in the pursuit of… computery stuff) wanted to remove components from old circuit boards and maybe plug them in somewhere else to see what happens. To remove these components, you could go piece by piece with a soldering iron and some pliers OR you could throw the whole thing in a toaster and set it to 500. In case you’re wondering if that’s bad for the components, the answer is probably yes but we’ll never know because as soon as the circuit board was pulled out of the toaster, the pieces fell all over the floor and were never heard from again. Still.. it was a good time.

Next up, we’ve got my new phone. It’s a good phone. Full of fancy features and pretty tiny to boot. I’ve had a few gripes about it but all-in-all, it’s a good phone. Gripe 1: the camera is great but the default mode (which reverts every time you start the camera) takes a picture and asks whether or not you’d like to upload it. This sounds like a yes or no question, so why do they only give you a choice of “Yes”? Sure you can click Options->Take Another Picture or click the tiny “C” button under the arrow keys but that’s hardly user-friendly and I’m all about user-friendliness. Besides, I can’t imagine a time where I would need to take a picture and then *immediately* upload it. Unless I was getting mugged, or falling into a volcano, and that’s only happened twice and both times I couldn’t get the keylock off in time. Gripe 2: as much as it looks really flat, it is. So much so that it feels like I’m pressing a plate of glass to the side of my head every time I use it. I don’t really like this feeling, but the speaker is pretty hard to hear if you have the volume set to a reasonably non-distorting level. A bluetooth headset would definitely come in handy. The mp3 support on the phone is pretty nice, if you’re into that kinda thing. I prefer to leave the battery to deal with calls and little else. The battery does last though. I’ve had it on for 3 days with no charging and pretty heavy use. Anyway, enough about the phone.

Ah, what a lovely cat… if only I weren’t allergic. Alright I suppose it’s not that bad, I mean, I did choose to live here and I’m getting by. In this picture, she can be seen gazing out the window while resting on the warm salamander heated by the radiator. I don’t suppose there’s much else I can say about the cat. Actually, this little blurb would be the perfect size for her because there’s not much to her daily routine. It’s get up, go whine at Brian for whatever reason (she’s a very antisocial cat and hates to be picked up, so I do it a lot). After that, go eat some food and sit on the radiator for hours on end, looking out at the other animals scrounging for their food.

Now let’s head down to St. Louis and then back a smidgen to land in Collinsville, IL. There’s a place there called Cahokia Mounds. If you were in my anthropology class (or any like it, I imagine) you’ve heard of this place and its wonders from an ancient world. Wonders of big mounds and civilizations stretching all over the midwest. Ok honestly, I didn’t like this place much. It may be that I had some pretty high expectations for it since I had learned a bit about it in class but its only excitement is to imagine what it used to be with no help from the barren wasteland it’s become. There was a gift shop and a few shops set up by some local Native American descendants and a pretty thorough museum which gave an idea of what the mounds could look like if someone forked over the cash to have an authentic restoration. Maybe its harsh to say that this place isn’t doing enough with what they’ve got but I don’t hold a high regard for tourist attractions of historic and geographic significance that might as well be anywhere else in the world. Oh well, maybe other people get more out of hiking up to the top of the mound and looking out over the highway other mounds. As for the picture, I think Greg is declaring some kind of “power” since he’s higher up and has his fist in the air. Either that or he’s punching the sun, which does appear rather bright at the moment.

Last but not least, I made caramel oranges! Well I tried anyway, and I think they tasted pretty good, but maybe I was expecting them to taste like something other than oranges. You know, more caramely. I do love my caramel. The recipe calls for 4 large oranges with the skin removed and cut into thin strips. Then you simmer those for 10 mins or so and melt some sugar. After you put some water in with the sugar you add the orange peels and simmer some more. Then pour the peels and the rest of the sauce over the thinly sliced orange rounds. The peels tasted pretty good but there wasn’t much extra caramel sauce to pour on so you had to try and get some orange slices with a few peels on top and then jam the whole thing in your mouth at once and lemme tell ya, that ain’t easy. Hopefully I’ll have some more experimental recipes (because with me cooking, it’s all experimental) to show pictures of or talk about.

And, that’s about it. I could elaborate on some other things but I think I’ve gone on long enough and I don’t have pictures of anything else. Thanks for stopping by!